Reading for 2006

Many of my favorite blog sites have recently listed favorite books from 2005, reading plans for 2006, or simply the books currently in the stack. I have never kept track of my books read, never followed a plan of those I will read. Moving from one to the next, discovering worlds and characters before unknown, I always end up with a good year of reading. This year, though, I seriously considered joining my friend at Writing and Living for a year of Dickens; we jokingly refer to each other as Twin Daughters of Different Mothers (think Dan Fogelberg and Tim Weisberg here), so I thought it might be fun to be on the same reading plan. Then, I found myself clicking "send" at Amazon.com, with nary a Dickens in my cart. How would I possibly get through all of Dickens and read the stack I just ordered? Not going to happen. Oh well, at least I figured that out before I jumped into the deep end.

My plan? To keep reading. The only change will be to scribble a list of all the books I have read in the back of my little red leather calendar . I also plan to focus on things that I own or that I can borrow from the library. Yeah, yeah, it sounds like another resolution that will be easy to break, but I can certainly keep it for January and February. When you add The Count of Monte Cristo to the stack from Amazon, I will be a happy and busy reader for weeks to come.

The latest Amazon stack:

Madeleine L'Engle

Certain Women: A Novel
Glimpses of Grace: Daily Thoughts and Reflections
Madeleine L'Engle Herself : Reflections on a Writing Life
The Ordering of Love : The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L'Engle

Elizabeth Gaskell

Ruth
Mary Barton
Cranford
Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (a biography by Jenny Uglow)

Plus:

Miniatures and Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen by Peter Leithart
Slouching Towards Bethlehem : Essays by Joan Didion
The Day I Became an Autodidact by Kendall Hailey
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin

A variety of reading lists can be found at the following:

Mental multivitamin
Semicolon, with another post that has links to other's lists
Sparrow at Intent
pages turned
The Economist's books of the year 2005

Mrs. M-mv and Semicolon were inspiration for selections in my current stack.

When I think of the reading to come, I am grateful for my eyesight, my ability to think and imagine as I read, the strength to hold a book, and the passion to keep learning. With new stories to read, people and countries and philosophies to be introduced to, it promises to be a grand year.